April 2013

See me live at 2:00 pm today here at GENBAND Perspectives 2013 where I speak on a panel "Harnessing the Power of Social Networking" in the Grand Cypress Ballroom here at the Hyatt Regecy Grand Cypress.

I am in Orlando for GENBAND Perspectives 2013 and the show is about to begin. last night there was a poolside reception which was rained out - but the venue was able to move about 1,000 people quickly indoors where the reception continued without a hitch. OK, a few of us had some wet clothes but other than that things have gone well so far.

Drummers kick off event

GENBAND Chairman David Walsh takes the stage. "Digital life is interactive.

There has been talk within the telecom industry for many years regarding whether communications service providers would eventually just become providers of dumb pipes or provide added value they can charge for. The move to IMS in-part was supposed to allow these companies to add more apps and services to their offerings, allowing them to generate more revenue.

When Apple opened up its iPhone platform, hundreds of thousands of apps began to do many of the things telcos would have liked to provide. Moreover, many functions which telcos used to charge for like SMS were given away for free from the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook.

Virtually everything in our lives has gotten more expensive over the years such as housing, cars, postage stamps, food and energy and yet telecommunications and broadband service costs continue to plummet. This state of affairs is in-part due to Moore’s Law and a side benefit of the declining connectivity costs has been bringing the world closer together. In the nineties you could bankrupt yourself quite easily if you direct-dialed from one country to another yet today IP communications has lowered the price of such calls to zero or a few pennies a minute depending on your location and device.

In 1982 a company called LanguageLine Solutions was founded to focus on helping translate conversations via telephone and since then, the company has grown to 6,000 interpreters who speak 98.6% of the 6,809 languages spoken in the world today.

For many years now I have waxed poetic about the need for Apple to create a large screen phone. With the latest iteration of the iPhone, the “5” they decided to elongate the device but not make it wider. To me, this mistake is the worst that Apple has made since ignoring the market for seven-inch tablets and then playing catch-up with the iPad mini.

At first, when asked about larger screen phones, Apple said that they didn’t fit in the hand.

I’d like to start by saying my heart goes out to the victims of the horrific Boston Marathon and their families. Having said that I read with interest that The New York Times, Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal took down their paywalls during this crisis and moreover many reporters were reporting on Twitter without linking to any content on their sites.

The challenge paid and many other media outlets face is obvious… They need to master social media while also getting readers to pay for their news and/or visit their websites for more information.

Of course there is the ability to give away a great deal of free content on Twitter and other social sites in order to get many followers who can be then directed to special subscription offers.

Last year, TMC and its partners launched the first WebRTC conference in the world and the market reacted enthusiastically with a sold out exhibit hall and a standing room only crowd. I tell you this because I haven’t seen so much interest in a new technology in over a decade. It reminds me of the early days of VoIP and SIP and the Internet all rolled up in one.

Flash memory has already made major inroads in data centers and on Macs and PCs – augmenting hard disks by prefetching and caching data. Flash memory is not perfect but it is getting better as error correction systems have improved and prices have decreased over time. Hard disks too have improved but are hampered by physics – remember, we are talking spinning patters here.

These are very dark days for people who work for many divisions of Microsoft as tablets and smartphones have absolutely decimated the PC market as evidenced by a decline of 14% in sales of PCs last quarter. This news comes on the heels of the Windows 8 launch, the new OS which fuses the best of the tablet and Windows experience in one platform. The only problem is the new OS with all its marketing and slick new form factors isn’t cutting it, as consumers gravitate towards smaller screen devices.

Expect many calls for Steve Ballmer to be fired and when you consider how many markets Redmond has squandered since 2000 you could make a solid case for pushing him out.

Love it or hate it, social media has to be embraced by companies who are interested in communicating with their customers where they spend an increasing amount of their time. Yet scaling social media interactions is truly challenging. A company called NextPrinciples is looking to simplify the complexity of integrating social into your company with its Insight-To-Action Platform.

When I asked Ted Sapountzis Head of Marketing & Product Management with the company what pains they eliminate for customers he told me his company provides them with a unique platform which integrates analytics, listening, monitoring and engagement together.

According to IDC, PC sales are in a tailspin with 76.3 million units sold in the first quarter of 2013. This number represents a decline of 13.9% compared to the forecast decline of 7.7%. These are the worst numbers since IDC started tracking in 1994 and it is the fourth quarter of year-on-year shipment declines.

The most fascinating demo I have seen today which seems to have no immediate use is Hyperlapse – a service which works with Google Street View to generate movies based on coordinates you enter on a map by dragging and dropping pins. To be fair, the service does allow the user to become familiar with a road or course before traversing it. It is more useful for this purpose than Google Street View because you don’t have to traverse the map a few frames at a time by hand.

I am left wondering if there will be any perceived objectivity issues as a result of the $5M investment by Jeff Bezos in Business Insider. Like Jeff, I am a big fan of Business Insider… Henry Blodget and his team do great work.

I also can’t help but wonder how the coverage on the site may potentially change. Will we see as many stories critical of Amazon?

Has the SEC just signed the death warrant for the press release market? Possibly. Standard operating procedure today is to distribute press releases through established services like Business Wire and PR Newswire but thanks to the SEC, you can post your news on social sites – as long as users are told where to look.

Microsoft seems to make an OS you HAVE to buy while Apple makes an OS you WANT to buy

The Microsoft Store has good news for people waiting to pick up a new Windows 8 machine… Lower prices on relatively new hardware. Interestingly, only a few specific models saw their prices decreased. Some believe it has to do with specific models which didn’t sell well while others think the challenge is Windows 8 itself.

How content marketing kept President Obama in office despite a challenging economy

To the tens of millions of people who didn’t vote for president Obama in the 2012 election, his reelection came as a surprise. After the historic Tea Party victory in 2010 and record-high unemployment, legions of political opponents could not believe President Obama was reelected.

Whatever your political views, you must concede the Obama White House does an amazing job controlling the content which the public consumes about it.

A recent article by Nancy Benac of ABC News delves into the issue more thoroughly describing the Obama Image Machine as:

Serving up a stream of words, images and videos that invariably cast the president as commanding, compassionate and on the ball.

With the billions of messages sent each year it is tough to come to the conclusion that messaging is broken but it is. If I send an SMS from a cell phone for example it typically goes to another cell phone. Lets say I am on a PC and want to communicate via SMS - I can use an email gateway but I would have to know which carrier first before I choose a gateway. For example Vodafone in western Japan uses the following gateway address: number@n.vodafone.ne.jp while Vodafone in Okinawa uses the following slightly different address: number@q.vodafone.ne.jp.

For Star Trek fans who have grown up seeing fictional nanites solving a variety of problems in the human body and beyond, this has to be a very exciting month. Researchers from the Sheffield Centre for Robotics programmed a group of 40 small robots which could organize themselves into a group and work together to solve simple tasks. The robots here are fairly simple – they can move in any direction and are a few inches in diameter. Even their intelligence is rudimentary.